This subject is near and dear to my heart because I am a speech-pathology major! I absolutely love the major and I'm sure other speech-pathology majors will feel the same way!

1. I wish I were a schwa. It's never stressed.

Here is a little speech humor for you. The schwa, which is a phonetic symbol, is never stressed. As a speech-language pathology major, I would love to never be stressed.

2. One does not simply prepare for the GRE.

You can prepare all you want, but I swear, you never feel completely prepared for the daunting task that is the GRE. This test is required for us to get into graduate-level programs. It consists of verbal reasoning and math skills (yuck!). Nevertheless, we need it to get into the graduate program so it will unfortunately be a necessary evil.

3. No one understands what you are going to be

You say, "I'm studying speech-language pathology in school." Then people say, "Oh! That's great! Um...What do they do exactly?" And you just have to sigh and say, "Speech therapist."

4. You notice the way people speak more and more.

You listen to the way people speak and you try to refrain from addressing their lisp or glottal fry. As hard as it is, you just have to keep your mouth shut. But that doesn't stop you from analyzing people's speech!

5. You think about how weird some words are.

It's safe to say it's not normal to repeat the same word over and over again to find the articulation placement for a regular person. Just another day for a SLP major. After a while, the word that you keep repeating doesn't even seem like a real word.

6. Your Pinterest board is filled with therapy ideas.

Sometimes when browsing through Pinterest you come across some great ideas for therapy. You pin them for future reference!

7. You watch kid's movies to "stay current."

I'm only in undergrad right now so I don't actually do any therapy right now but I can tell you that I still watch kids movies. I know many SLPs that still watch kids movies with the excuse that they have to stay current with what their clients like. But really, we like kids movies. (Except Frozen...Frozen can die in kid's movie hell).

8. Stress is our middle name.

Between observations, assignments, tests, quizzes and whatever else we have to complete, it can get quite stressful. Sometimes we might have a meltdown from way too much stress but we have to re-center ourselves and just try to do our best.

9. Phonetic transcription can trip you up sometimes.

With phonetic transcription there is a symbol for every sound. Some symbols look like normal alphabetic letters. When I was taking phonetics, it would sometimes trip me up to see certain symbols. The pronunciation totally different than it normally is.